Which Feeds Matter?

Whether you’re talking about the size of the web or the size of the blogosphere, the whole notion of size can be misleading. People create and abandon new sites, pages and blogs faster than they abandon South Beach diets. Add in duplicates, spam and other assorted junk, and you have a hard time measuring what’s real, let alone what’s relevant.

The more important question is: which feeds matter? Bloglines can add some unique perspective to this question, because we know which sites are compelling enough to attract at least one subscriber, among those that offer feeds. Of course, not every site has a feed or even needs a feed. But among those that do, Bloglines members are choosing to track some and not others. 

According to Bloglines members around the world, 1,121,655 feeds “matter” to date.  Note this includes only content feeds tracked, and not topics tracked via “saved” or “persistent” searches using the Bloglines service.

While this number is interesting to consider in a number of ways, two stand out for me.  First, compared with the millions of blogs in existence, these 1.12 million feeds include the smaller subset that is the most valuable. Secondly, and conversely, when compared with the mere 2500 sites deemed worthy of monthly ranking by Nielsen, these 1.12 million feeds demonstrate a far deeper, richer body of sites that “matter” to Internet users on a regular basis.

Here’s a look at the growth of feeds subscribed to by Bloglines members since it was established in June 2003:

The variation among these feeds is significant. The most popular is Slashdot, with 37,400 active subscribers. Meanwhile, sites with only 1 current subscriber include Haag’s Pop Podium and Justin’s Guide to Everything, where the only subscriber is me. I have no idea who Justin is but thought he would appreciate the audience. (Maybe people will start a new game called Bloglineswhacking to find feeds with only one subscriber?)

It’s also interesting to note that these feeds are very prolific and getting more so everyday: In June we surpassed 500 million articles in the Bloglines feed index, and in the next few days we’ll cross the 600 million mark. We’re adding more than 2 million new articles every day. There’s no question that the blogosphere and other sources of feed content are the fastest growing segment of new content on the web.

We’ll keep you updated on how these numbers grow over time.

Jim Lanzone